British Business in British Strategies for Decolonization in the Gold Coast

Abstract

British companies' experience of, and response to, Ghanaian decolonization was shaped both by a transformation in the economic activities of the colonial state beginning during the late 1930s and by British proposals for constitutional change. There is little evidence to support a neocolonialist interpretation of the transfer of power in the Gold Coast. Far from working hand-in-hand, business and government were frequently at odds and, although British businessmen were invited to the Colonial Office to discuss constitutional change, their concerns were far from paramount in official policy-making. Yet this did not mean that British companies were not allocated a role in post-war British imperial policy. On the contrary, the Labour government's plans for colonial economic development, and in particular for accelerated production of colonial exports, depended upon their co-operation. This chapter uses a case study of the Gold Coast mining industry to explore how at least some British companies fitted into the interstices of post-war Labour imperial economic policy. It then examines the policy of successive Conservative governments towards British business.